


Blood before water, and water before all else

by zeropixelcount



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, GFY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-06
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-23 21:57:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/626941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeropixelcount/pseuds/zeropixelcount
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a fic-promptly prompt: "Star Wars, Owen and Beru Lars, they raised Luke as their own son – he had no idea at all he wasn’t"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood before water, and water before all else

Blood before water, and water before all else.

“It’s safer this way,” Owen says, flat and final, echoes of _my way or not at all_ burrowing under the surface, and the Jedi - just Ben, now, she corrects herself, just Ben even in her mind - looks to her as if he knows she’s the only one who’s ever been able to bring him around once his mind is set. And she - 

\- she _agrees_ with him. 

It’s a risk, as it is. To hide _his_ son on his own home planet; with his step-brother’s family, no less - 

\- it’s a breathtaking risk. To give the child _his_ name as well, no matter how much Owen loved his step-mother - 

\- she shakes her head. Holds out her arms. Schmi matters to the Jedi - to _Ben -_ on a mystical level, but _she_ knew the real woman, longer and better than he did, and - feet planted firmly in the sand, a desert pragmatist to the bone - she uses the weapon that comes to her hand. “ _She_ would have chosen her grandson’s safety over her name.” 

Blood before water, and water before all else. 

 

This would never have worked in a city. Never even in a village. But when you live on the edge of the Waste and work every hour you’re awake to keep the place liveable, when you can go days or weeks at a time without seeing a soul other than your husband, when you have visitors to your homestead as rarely as a triple full moon - 

\- well, then there is a little more room for faking a pregnancy, even if you don’t have a great deal of notice. 

Still, she suspects Ben may have taken a hand, when it became clear their minds were set; she’s spoken to old friends who act like they remember her telling them, back in what would’ve been her second trimester, before any of this was even a shimmer in the distance. 

Maybe that would be too far for him, the crossing of some ethical line; maybe they’ve just convinced themselves that _of course_ they were told, they’re friends, aren’t they? The mind can do strange things of its own accord, out here under the parching sun. She’d like to ask him, but Owen’s right when he says it isn’t safe; they’ve cut that tie for a reason. 

 

Owen takes to fatherhood like a man who maybe wasn’t entirely truthful when he said he didn’t care whether they ever had children; says _my son_ almost the moment the dust of Ben’s departure has settled. He deals in absolutes, always has; there’s no poetry in the man; _I will raise him as my son_ was meant as literal truth, and acted on. 

She says _our boy_ or _little Luke_ more often than anything else, not because she loves him any the less, but because she sees the shades, the swirls and colours and layers where he sees only sand and sky and nothing in between; he never comments on it. Even when they’re alone in bed, there’s never a sign from Owen to suggest he doesn’t wholeheartedly believe the lie they’re telling. 

She wonders, sometimes, which of them that makes the stronger. 

 

They never see Ben, of course - but she sees the dust of his passing, swirling in the air; not a _literal_ seeing, nothing she could explain to her literal-minded man, but - traces. A new distance, from the sand people; a new caution, from the jawa traders. Movement where movement should not be, and stillness where movement ought to be. Desert-born children look for such things from the cradle; she knows Luke sees them. 

A child’s mind conjures an invisible guardian; a youth’s twists it into a sense of personal immortality. He takes _breathtaking_ risks, risks that make her bones run to sand and her heart fall like stone, and she busies her hands with work and her mind with recalling Schmi’s stories, of another boy brave enough to spit into a sandstorm and hell-bound to break his mother’s heart. 

Luke’s recklessness has a cleaner root, at least. He faces danger without fear because he believes the world will bend itself to catch him if he falls, where _he_ \- never named nor spoken of in this household, but often on her mind as her boy grows - lived so much in fear that the danger he grabbed by both hands was just one more pinch of sand thrown into the storm. 

 

She sees Ben’s shadow every time her boy returns safe to her, so clearly that the one time he darkens their door with his physical presence barely stands out. Owen holds his temper, barely; he’s gruff and unfriendly as he hustles Luke inside and sends Ben away. Even the _thank you_ on her lips goes unspoken, but she thinks he hears it anyway. 

It looks strange, that they do not thank this stranger who saved their son, do not offer shade and water to a traveller, and she sees Luke mark the strangeness that traces the outline of the lie. 

She wants to talk to Ben, suddenly. Wants to know what it was he feared about this path; she has begun to be afraid that the lie, if ever unravelled, will poison Luke’s childhood as surely as slavery poisoned _his_. 

 

_Then we will not let it unravel_ , whispers Owen in her ear at night, and bends his attention to keeping Luke busy with chores and farm-work, seeking to mould him into a man who will not search for answers when there is work to be done, or failing that, one too set on a single dream to turn aside and look around. 

With Imperial troopers on her doorstep and the pieces falling into place around her, she knows it hasn’t worked. The boy who has no fear of falling has flown the nest, and all she hopes for, now, is that the unseen force-field will catch him one last time. 

Owen’s arm wraps around her shoulders for what comfort remains, here at the end; their part is all-but played out.


End file.
